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Asteroids Full Screen4/6/2021
While all were good indicators, accolades from fellow engineers are rarely good predictors of market performance.Turn down the lights, turn up the volume and travel back to 1978.
Based on the original work Pythentic Asteroids by Nick Redshaw. It kept selling. Months after its introduction, when the sales cycle for an arcade game should have ended, its manufacturer kept receiving orders. Although orders have tapered off, the games legacy lives on with innumerable arcade, home and web-based adaptations. This obsession, over a quarter of a century old, owes its success to Atari programmer Ed Logg and a game that never took off. Lyle Rains, the director of Ataris coin-op group, needed Loggs advice. The company was testing a game that featured a giant asteroid which couldnt be destroyed. According to Logg, (Rains) felt that if people kept shooting at it maybe they really want to blow up asteroids. He said, Well, why dont we have a game where you shoot the rocks and blow them up. He doesnt want to just randomly shoot because then you would have too many rocks flying around and it would be too damn dangerous. Having seen flying saucers in the game Spacewar, Logg suggested that they introduce a similar flying saucer to chase the player on to the next round. I was familiar with Spacewar, the original vector game, and so I knew that the high resolution was required. Since Logg was on a streak with great ideas, Rains gave him the green light on XY monitor and everything else. Logg was dubbed Asteroids programmer, project leader and artist. Also present in that first meeting was Howie Delman, who joined as engineer, and then Paul Mancuso joined the team as the games technician. The basic underlying routines for the existing XY hardware had already been used in Ataris Lunar Lander. Logg wanted two saucers with different roles, The big saucer would come in: Shoot me, shoot me Im just going to take a few random shots. Im cannon fodder. The small saucer would arrive after three big saucers. Once your score got higher and higher the saucer would come in and shoot faster and faster and faster and faster until you reached some maximum limit, says Logg, Reach that limit and the spaceship is probably coming in as fast as he can, hes shooting as fast he can and theres an angle range that he shoots you at and it slowly decreases until he is extremely accurate. Asteroids maxes out in complexity somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 points. I could tell when late in the project people would come in and bug you: Can I play the game now Can I play the game now Or youd leave for the night, come back and the hi-score table would be full.
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